We’ll all have to attend no less than yet another day to see essentially the most highly effective rocket ever constructed take to the skies — even “Starships” singer Nicki Minaj.
SpaceX tried to launch its new Starship V3 megarocket for the primary time ever this night (Could 21), from the corporate’s Starbase website in South Texas. Technical points cropped up late within the countdown, nonetheless, and SpaceX could not resolve them in time to get Starship V3 off the bottom.
“We’re studying about so much about these programs as we execute them for the primary time, and we’re not capable of principally troubleshoot all of those points in these last seconds to get to launch,” Dan Huot, of SpaceX communications, mentioned throughout the firm’s launch webcast in the present day.
“That basically makes this a moist costume rehearsal,” he added, referring to a standard preflight fueling check. “We had been capable of totally load the automobiles, and we’ll take the time now, determine what tripped us up earlier than launch, after which really get right into a flight tomorrow.”
As that remark signifies, the subsequent alternative for a liftoff is Friday night (Could 22), possible in the identical window as in the present day’s attempt — 6:30 p.m. EDT to eight p.m. EDT (2230 to 0000 GMT).
The scrub was likely disappointing for a lot of area followers, together with Minaj, who was readily available at Starbase for in the present day’s launch try.
“That is historic. This can be a main second, y’all,” Minaj mentioned throughout SpaceX’s launch webcast, including that she’s by no means seen a launch in particular person earlier than.
Minaj wore a SpaceX Starship T-shirt for the launch. “I like this shirt,” she mentioned. “And it is an ideal identify — Starship!” (One among Minaj’s most well-known songs is “Starships,” from the 2012 Album “Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded.”)
SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity colonize the moon and Mars, finish deploying its Starlink megaconstellation in Earth orbit and do pretty much everything else the company wants to do in the final frontier.
The megarocket remains in the development phase, however. It debuted in April 2023 and has flown 10 more test flights since then, all of them suborbital. The next launch will be the 12th for the program overall but the first for Starship V3 (“Version 3”), a dramatic overhaul designed to take the vehicle a giant step closer to operational status. It will also be the first liftoff for Starbase’s Pad 2, which features many upgrades over the site’s original pad as well.
V3 is the first iteration of Starship capable of flying to the moon and Mars, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said. If all goes according to plan, it’s the variant that will fly on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission — a docking test in Earth orbit — in mid to late 2027. And it’s the vehicle that will land astronauts on the moon on Artemis 4 in late 2028.
There’s competition for those flights, however: NASA is also considering using Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, and will probably go with whichever vehicle is ready (though the agency has said both landers might fly on Artemis 3).
On Thursday, SpaceX even announced a more ambitious crewed test flight for Starship: The world’s first private trip to Mars.
In a video, SpaceX announced that cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who financed a private polar spaceflight with SpaceX on a Dragon capsule called Fram2 in 2025, will lead a flyby around Mars sometime in the future.
“So it’s going to be a flyby mission of Mars,” Wang said. “A lot of people talk about Mars. We like Mars, we’re gonna land on Mars. We’re gonna do a city on Mars. But let’s get it started with a flyby.”
Liftoff seemed tantalizingly close multiple times today. The countdown clock reached its built-in hold at T-40 seconds, then rolled past that mark several times before an issue cropped up and caused a reset. One such issue concerned the water diverter under the launch pad, according to Huot.
SpaceX called the launch off today around 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT). There were still more than 20 minutes left in the launch window, but that wasn’t the issue.
SpaceX can hold at T-40 seconds for just a few minutes; after that, propellant temperatures rise too much to ensure nominal liftoff conditions, Huot explained.
